Restoring Lies and Insanity to American History

The assault on historical memory by the Trump administration is designed to obliterate our shared understanding of reality and whitewash the crimes of the past to whitewash the crimes of the present.

You’re Too Late — by Mr. Fish

President Donald Trump’s latest executive order titled “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY” replicates a tactic used by all authoritarian regimes. In the name of countering bias, they distort the nation’s history into self-serving mythology.

History will be used to justify the power of the ruling elites in the present by deifying the ruling elites of the past. It will disappear the suffering of the victims of genocide, enslavement, discrimination and institutional racism. The repression and violence during our labor wars — hundreds of workers were killed by gun thugs, company goons, police and soldiers from National Guard units in the struggle to unionize — will be untold. Historical figures, such as Woodrow Wilson, will be social archetypes whose darker actions, including the decision to re-segregate the federal government and oversee one of the most aggressive campaigns of political repression in U.S. history, will be ignored.

In the America of our Trump-approved history books — I have read the textbooks used in “Christian” schools so this is not conjecture — equal opportunity for all exists and has always existed. America exemplifies human progress. It has constantly improved and perfected itself under the tutelage of its enlightened and almost exclusively white male rulers. It is the vanguard of “Western civilization.”

The great leaders of the past are portrayed as paragons of courage and wisdom, bringing civilization to the lesser breeds of the earth. George Washington, who with his wife owned and “rented” more than 300 slaves and oversaw brutal military campaigns against Native Americans, is a heroic model for imitation. The dark lust for conquest and wealth — which lay behind the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans — is sidelined to tell the story of the valiant struggle by European and Euro-American pioneers to build the greatest nation on earth. Capitalism is blessed as the highest freedom. Those who are poor and oppressed, who do not have enough in the land of equal opportunity, deserve their fate.

Those who fought injustice, often at the cost of their own lives, are disappeared or, as with Martin Luther King Jr., sanitized into a banal cliché, frozen forever in time with his “I Have a Dream” speech. The social movements that opened up democratic space in our society — the abolitionists, the labor movement, the suffragists, the socialists and communists, the civil rights movement and the anti-war movements — are disappeared or ridiculed along with those writers and historians, such as Howard Zinn and Eric Foner, who document the struggles and achievements of popular movements. The status quo was not challenged in the past, according to this myth, and cannot be challenged in the present. We always had reverence for our leaders and must maintain this reverence.

“Pay attention to what they tell you to forget,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser presciently warned.

Trump’s executive order begins:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.

Authoritarians promise to replace bias with “objective truth.” But their “objective truth” is about sacralizing our civil religion and leadership cult. The civil religion has its sacred sites — Mount Rushmore, Plymouth Rock, Gettysburg, Independence Hall in Philadelphia and Stone Mountain, the huge bas-relief that depicts the Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. It has its own rituals — Thanksgiving, Independence Day, President’s Day, Flag Day and Memorial Day. It is patriarchal and hyper patriotic. It fetishizes the flag, the Christian cross, the military, guns and Western civilization, a code for white supremacy. It justifies our exceptionalism and right to global dominance. It links us to a Biblical tradition that tells us we are a chosen people, a Christian Nation, as well as the true heirs of the Enlightenment. It informs us that the powerful and the wealthy are blessed and chosen by God. It feeds the dark elixir of unbridled nationalism, historical amnesia and unquestioning obedience.

There is proposed legislation in Congress calling for the carving of Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore, alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, making Trump’s birthday a federal holiday, putting Trump’s face on new $250 bills, renaming Washington Dulles International Airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport and amending the 22nd Amendment to allow Trump to serve a third term.

An education system, Jason Stanley writes in “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” is “the foundation upon which a political culture is built. Authoritarians have long understood that when they wish to change the political culture, they must begin by seizing control of education.”

The capture of the education system, he writes “is not only to render a population ignorant of the nation’s history and problems but also to fracture those citizens into a multitude of different groups with no possibility of mutual understanding, and hence no possibility of mass unified action. As a consequence, anti-education renders a population apathetic — leaving the task of running the country to others, be they autocrats, plutocrats, or theocrats.”

At the same time, despots mobilize the supposedly aggrieved group — in our case white Americans — to carry out acts of intimidation and violence in support of the leader and the nation and to exact retribution. The twin goals of this anti-education campaign are paralysis among the subjugated and fanaticism among true believers.

The uprisings that swept the nation triggered by the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery not only decried institutional racism and police brutality, but targeted statues, monuments and buildings commemorating white supremacy.

A statue of George Washington in Portland, Oregon was spray-painted with the words “genocidal colonist” and torn down. The headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which spearheaded the erection of monuments to confederate leaders in the early part of the 20th century in Richmond, Virginia, was set on fire. The statue of newspaper editor Edward Carmack, a supporter of lynching who urged whites to kill the African-American journalist Ida B. Wells for her investigations into lynching, was ripped down. In Boston, a statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded and statues of the confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, along with one of the racist former mayor and police chief of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, were removed. Princeton University, which had long resisted calls to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its school of public policy because of his virulent racism, finally relented.

Monuments are not history lessons. They are pledges of allegiance, idols to the white ancestor cult. They whitewash the crimes of the past to whitewash the crimes of the present. Owning up to our past, the goal of critical race theory, shatters the myth perpetuated by white supremacists that our racial hierarchy is the natural outcome of a meritocracy where whites are endowed with superior intelligence, talent and civilization, rather than one that is engineered and rigidly enforced. Blacks in this racial hierarchy deserve to be at the bottom of society because of their innate characteristics.

It is only by naming and documenting these injustices and working to ameliorate them that a society can sustain its democracy and move towards greater equality, inclusion and justice.

All of these strides towards truth and historical accountability are to be reversed. Trump singled out for attack exhibits at The Smithsonian Institution, The National Museum of African American History and Culture and Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park. He promises to “take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties.” He demands monuments or exhibits that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times)” be removed and the nation “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

The executive order continues:

It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.

The attacks on programs such as critical race theory or diversity, equity and inclusion as Stanley points out “intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally being included — like Black Americans, for instance — are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or an unfair advantage. And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.”

Stanley, along with another Yale scholar on authoritarianism, Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny” and “The Road to Unfreedom,” is leaving the country for Canada to teach at the University of Toronto.

You can see my interview with Stanley here.

The goal is not to teach the public how to think, but what to think. Students will parrot back the mind-numbing slogans and clichés used to buttress power. This process strips education of any independence, intellectual inquiry or self-criticism. It turns schools and universities into indoctrination machines. Those who resist being indoctrinated are cast out.

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Oppressors always erase the history of the oppressed. They fear history. It was a crime to teach enslaved people to read. The ability to read meant they might have access to news of the slave uprising in Haiti, the only successful slave revolt in human history. They might learn of the slave revolts led by Nat Turner and John Brown. They might be inspired by the courage of Harriet Tubman, the fiery abolitionist who made over a dozen clandestine trips south to free enslaved people and later served as a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War. They might have access to the writings of Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists.

The organized struggle, vital to the history of people of color, the poor and the working class to secure equality, along with laws and regulations to protect them from exploitation, are to be fully shrouded in darkness. There will be no new investigations into our past. There will be no new historical evidence. There will be no new perspectives. We will be forbidden from excavating our identity as a people and a nation. This calcification is designed to deify our rulers, destroy a pluralistic, democratic society and inculcate personal and political somnambulism.